The Jewish Legacy Hidden in My Mayflower Line

I am an actuary by training. I do this work because I am deeply interested in it; I love learning about history and science, so exploring my own genealogy checks a lot of boxes for me. In my profession, we look at the world through the lens of data, seeking out the hidden patterns that govern human life. We calculate risk, measure survival, and find order in the noise. Yet, for a long time, the deepest branches of my own family tree remained entirely in the shadows.

I was raised Catholic, and as part of that upbringing, I was taught the Old Testament, and we even celebrated Passover. We went through the motions of these ancient traditions, never truly knowing why they felt so familiar, or where we had actually come from.

In search of the truth about a family rumor

Two summers ago, I decided to take a DNA test. As a child, I had heard a rumor from my dad’s mom, Nina Davis, that we were part Native American. Because I fell out of contact with my family 30 years ago, and my grandparents died long ago, I had no one left to ask about it. My dad’s aunt, Rose Davis of Maine, was our original family genealogist. She was the one who first informed us of our connection to Mayflower passenger George Soule back in the 1980s or 90s.

Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, painting by William Halsall 1882

I only met her a few times, but I still vividly remember sitting in the kitchen with her and her sister — my grandmother, Nina — in Natick, Massachusetts. Rose did a lot of her research the hard way: in person, traveling through Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Because of her, we always knew George was an indentured servant on the Mayflower. We knew he was there at the very beginning of the American story. But we had no idea how much more lay beneath the surface of that single fact, waiting to be calculated.

Unexpected clues in my DNA

My initial DNA test brought unexpected results. While I didn’t show up as having any Native American DNA myself, I could see obvious cousins of mine living in the Maine and Nova Scotia areas — where my grandmother Nina came from — who did show as having small amounts of Native American DNA. I guess I just happened to not inherit any, or at least not enough to register. But the test held other secrets. It indicated that I was part African and Middle Eastern, too, which was a total surprise to me. Though they were very small amounts — about 1% each — the test listed surnames from around the world associated with my haplotype. Among them, I recognized names like Cohen.

Driven by a need to understand these unexpected signatures, I took a DNA test with MyHeritage to see if their ethnicity estimate would help solve this puzzle. The MyHeritage results did, and more: they reported that I was 2.5% Ashkenazi and 1.5% Middle Eastern. I spent months — thousands of hours — working on my family tree, searching for names of people who I thought might explain this Jewish and Middle Eastern ancestry in a family that had always identified as Northern European and Catholic.

The answer was waiting for me in the hull of the Mayflower.

Connecting the historical dots

One day, I was reviewing my connection to George Soule on Wikipedia, and I saw something incredible: the entry suggested his family was Jewish, originally from Amsterdam. In the early 1600s, Amsterdam was a sanctuary for Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews fleeing the horrors of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. They lived in relative peace, but it was a fragile peace that they guarded fiercely. To avoid drawing the ire of local authorities, they often managed internal dissent with extreme measures.

In this pressure-cooker of religious tension, George Soule’s family became involved in printing and publishing a highly controversial, radical book called The Perth Assembly. It was a text that openly challenged the religious authority of the English Crown. It is now believed that this explosive controversy, and the threat of severe persecution, is what motivated George’s sudden flight from the Old World. He didn’t just sail for adventure; he fled for his life.

The historical threads began to intertwine in ways that felt almost mathematically designed. I joined the Soule Kindred Project, a lineage association, and after my DNA sample and tree were reviewed, I was admitted. The connections kept compounding. George Soule had boarded the Mayflower bonded as an indentured servant to Edward Winslow, one of the primary leaders of the Plymouth colony. Historically, Winslow was believed to be closely associated with Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, a prominent scholar in Amsterdam who actively sought to spread the Jewish diaspora to the ends of the earth, believing that scattering the Jewish people to all corners of the world — including the newly discovered Americas — was a prerequisite for the coming of the Messiah.

Survival against impossible odds

The story of that crossing in 1620 is often painted with the broad brushstrokes of thanksgiving and survival, but the raw reality was incredibly grim. Along with George, Edward Winslow had taken custody of two other children for the voyage. They were the tragic offspring of an adulterous affair back in England, exiled to the New World by a humiliated husband who demanded their permanent removal as a condition to patch up his marriage. They were sent into the freezing unknown. Sadly, both of those children died during that brutal, starving first winter in Plymouth.

But George Soule survived. He survived the freezing cold, the rampant disease, and the starvation that claimed half the colony. He went on to sign the Mayflower Compact, gain his freedom, and become a vital contributor to colonial life, serving on town committees and navigating the early, turbulent boundary disputes of the new frontier.

Signing the Mayflower Compact 1620, a painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1899

A Jewish legacy in colonial America

The Jewish presence in the early colony was not an isolated anomaly. In 1621, the ship Fortune arrived at Plymouth. Onboard was Moses Simmonson, who is also widely believed by historians to have been Jewish. Decades later, Moses’s daughter, Rebekkah, married John Soule Sr. — the son of George Soule. Rebekkah is my 10th great-grandmother.

This union of two families, both carrying the quiet, resilient legacy of European Jewish survival, is the ultimate anchor of my lineage. It explains why, more than four centuries later, that 2.5% Ashkenazi signature still glows clearly in my MyHeritage genetic code. It is a biological fossil, a physical proof of their survival.

The memory of these early cultural encounters and the silent presence of Jewish identity on the American frontier was preserved in the most unexpected places. I still hold in my hands an old book passed down from my dad’s mother, Nina Davis, published in Boston in 1859. It details the complex treaties between the colonial American government and the Native American Abenaki tribe.

The title page of the book

In the back of this dusty, fragile volume, there is a glossary of Abenaki words. As I flipped through it, my eyes stopped on a single translation. The Abenaki word for Jew was right there: “swip.” It is a quiet, stunning revelation that religion, identity, and the presence of Jewish traders and settlers were frequent topics of conversation on the earliest, most dangerous edges of the American wilderness.

The vocabulary entry of “swip — jew” from page 18 of Frederic Kidder’s “The Abenaki Indians; Their Treaties of 1713 & 1717, and a Vocabulary” (1859)

Through my grandmother, Nina Davis, this line of survivors eventually stretched down the centuries, connecting to civil war heroes and modern veterans. But for me, the heart of the story will always remain in the year 1620, on the wooden decks of a ship tossed by the cold Atlantic.

Looking back at the thousands of hours I have spent analyzing spreadsheets, DNA haplogroups, and historical archives, I realize that I am doing exactly what an actuary is trained to do: finding the patterns in the noise. But this is so much more than data. It is the story of how an Irish Catholic boy from Massachusetts carried the genetic memory of Amsterdam’s Jewish quarters and the unmatched resilience of a Pilgrim who looked at a freezing, hostile coastline and chose to survive.

AI illustration of George Soule arriving in America

We are not just a collection of random probabilities. We are made of survival, written in a code that never forgets.

Many thanks to Andrew Trainor for sharing this fascinating story with us. Explore more American Family Stories and discover how ordinary families experienced extraordinary moments in U.S. history on MyHeritage’s America 250 hub.